One Tech Tip: How to delete Facebook, Instagram and Threads if you don't like Meta's changes

abcnews.go.com:

Some Facebook, Instagram and Threads users are wondering whether to delete their accounts after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announced changes to content rules and plans to its fact-checking program

LONDON — Should I stay or should I go — from Meta's social media platforms?

That's what some Facebook, Instagram and Threads users are wondering after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement this month that the company is relaxing rules on harmful content such as hate speech and abandoning its fact checking program and replacing it with crowdsourced notes.

The changes have renewed interest among some users about deleting their Meta social media accounts. If you want to stop using platforms owned by Meta, here are some pointers:

Before deleting your Facebook account, you should download a copy of all your personal information, which includes details about your activity on the platform, things you've shared and data that the company has collected about you.

You'll have to go to your settings or the accounts center — the master control panel for all your Meta accounts — where you can choose to download everything or just items such as your profile, posts, messages, comments and reactions, and list of friends, even the ads you’ve clicked on and IP addresses you’ve used to connect to Facebook.

You can download information from a certain date range, such as the past month or six months, or for all the time you've had an account. If you're downloading photos, you can select their quality level: low, medium, high.

For security purposes, you'll only have four days to download your file. The process is similar for Instagram and Threads users.

Instagram users will need a password to download and access files and it could take up to